RoboPreacher

you have to learn how to die / if you want to want to be alive A sermon on the magi's incident : A happy new year to you all! I pray this new year falls afresh upon you. I hope this new year is utterly bursting with opportunities for you. And I wish that the newness of this new year will last you all year, too. That’s a lot to ask, though, I know. The actually new is incredibly rare . It’s hard to come by anything truly novel. Perhaps that’s why we’ve all grown a bit apathetic to new years’ resolutions . We’ve all learned the unhappy lesson that the smart money is on the way things already are. We’ve surmised the best we can do is just adjust ourselves to life’s cold hard facts. This is a malaise I , for one, fall into all too easily… Interestingly, though , it was by attending to the steady movements of the heavens that led the magi to notice the rising of a new star on the world’s stage. Our translations call these folks wise men . But the word is “magi.” As in, magici...

"Without a vision the people perish" ~Proverbs 29:18 (KJV) It is during these days of holidays that I think this parable is more important than ever. During this season of family gatherings, meal preparations, trips, card-sending, dressing-up, tree decorating, gift-giving, TV specials and the like; it is easy to feel like everything is clamoring for our all our time - all at once. Every ad claims to offer the thing we need to save us this holiday season. So, with all these things making demands on our time, we haggardly run through our days from one thing to the next; until finally, inevitably, we collapse. I think this is why everyone is sick of Christmas by the time it arrives. That point is so important I want to say it again: By the time December 24 finally rolls around, everyone is nearly sick and tired of Christmas because all these promises of holiday cheer has been shoved in our faces for (at least) over a month.   For most of November and Dec...